My Frida Kahlo Story

LAS MUJERES y LA CULTURA DE LA REVOLUCION FRIDA KAHLO As Obregon took charge, he began the task of winding down the violent military phase of the Revolution. Bitter fighting would continue but subside. His more formidable challenge was to translate the experience of the Revolution into palpable achievements. However, the nation was broke and broken; it was next to impossible to produce immediate results that would be visible to all, including the illiterate masses. Aesthetic achievement would have to substitute for immediate material results. Art would be drafted into the service of politics. Art before the Revolution was mostly an importation; it was the fashion to depreciate things Mexican. But art that emanated from the Revolution became a search for nativism. Obregon turned loose his cultural chieftain, Jose Vasconcelos, whose task was to build a "portfolio" that would draw its themes, spirit, and rationales from the aspirations of the Revolution. Vasconcelos would enlist artists Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera. Mural art became the medium to express these indigenous themes in a spectacular and panoramic explosion of brilliant warmth and color. Diego Rivera was the most prolific and arguably Mexico's greatest muralist. Was he also Mexico's greatest painter? The following transposes a familiar dialogue : 'Who's Diego Rivera?" "He was married to Frida Kahlo," some might add, "twice." Frida Kahlo's venturesome nature and dramatic impact would not be suggested by the of tact that her life began and ended in the same place: in a southeast suburb of OMexico City, Coyoacan, in a one-story stucco house. It is now the Frida Kahlo Museum, a wonderfully interesting but still inadequate (for it contains none of her greatest paintings) memorial to one of Mexico's greatest painters. And, indeed, she was one ofFthe world's greatest women painters I Painted on the wall above a cabinet containing one of her Tehuana costumes are these words: "Aqui Nacio Frida Kahlo el dia 7 de Julio de 1910" (Frida Kahlo was born here July 7, 1910). Frida was not without vanity; the majority of her paintings are self- portraits. But she would pick that date instead of the actual one, July 6, 1907, not to hide her age but because it would identify her with the year of the Revolution. Although Frida might list herself among the women 0£ the Revolution, she was, it could be argued, too young, even too urban, to be included in this study. Yet, by 1920, she was a teenager; throughout this decade, battles were still being fought and by "men" and "women" no older than Frida. While most of the combat was in the country, Mexico City was not free from military strife and, in any case, civil war had a devastating impact on sustaining life in the city. Kandell describes conditions: "For Mexico City, 1915 proved to be the worst year of the Revolution. Snipers terrorized residents. Fighting in the countryside disrupted harvest shipments and created acute shortages of staples. People scavenged garbage, begged for food, and slaughtered any pet that could be captured. Women -some of them barely in puberty, others old enough to be grandmothers -prostituted themselves for a meal of bread. Hospitals, insane asylums, and orphanages emptied their wards because their kitchens were bare. At dawn, death wagons circulated the streets to retrieve the unidentified bodies of people who had starved, and carried the corpses to the main cemetery for incineration." Her childhood was spent amidst the violence, the confusion, the fear and the deprivation that the Revolution wrought. From Frida's diary (written in the last decade of Frida's life but referring to when she was actually seven years old): 0I remember that I was four years old when the' tragic ten days' took place. I witnessed with my own eyes Zapata's peasants' battle against the Carrancistas. My situation was very clear. My mother opened the windows on Allende Street. She gave access to the Zapatistas, seeing to it that the wounded and hungry jumped from the windows of my house into the 'living room.' She cured them and gave them thick tortillas, the only food that could be obtained in Coyoacanin those days.... We were four sisters: Matita, Adri, me and Cristi, the chubby one... 2 "In 1914 bullets just hissed. I still hear their extraordinary sound. In the tianguid of Coyoacan, propaganda in favor of Zapata was made with corridos edited by Posada. On Friday these ballad sheets cost one centavo and, enclosed in a great wardrobe that smelled of walnut wood, Cristi and I sang them, while my mother and father watched out for us so that we could not fall into the hands of the guerrillas. I remember a wounded Carrancista running toward his stronghold the river of Coyoacan. From the window I also spied Zapatista with a bullet wound in his knee, squatting and putting on his sandals." Yet, if Frida was not a creator of the Revolution, she was assuredly one of its creations. She was a revelation of the Revolution --the evidence, if you will --that a woman molded in that crucible could be boldly different, a refutation of women's stereotype. La Lucha de Frida Kahlo was far more than the Revolution. At six years old, she was stricken with polio. To strengthen her withered right limb, she took up all kinds of sports, "male" sports: soccer, boxing, wrestling. She became a champion swimmer. But her leg remained thin; to hide the leg, she wore three or four socks on the calf and shoes with a built-up right heel (Herrera). But this tragedy was merely for practice. What followed shortly after her eighteenth birthday was an accident that would maim her for life. A trolley rammed into a poorly constructed bus in which Frida was riding. So much of her body was damaged, there is general disagreement over what was broken. Perhaps the most accurate description: "Her spinal column was broken in three places in the lumbar region. Her collarbone was broken, and her third and fourth ribs. Her right leg had eleven fractures and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was out of joint, her pelvis broken in three places. The steel handrail had literally skewered her body at the level of the abdomen; entering on the left side, it had come out through the vagina. `I lost my virginity,' she said." (H) (In fact it was too late for that.) Her body would begin a lifelong battle against decay, and she would endure at least thirty-two surgical operations, mostly on her spine, during the next twenty-nine years of her life. But this horrible event was a "baptism by fire" for her artistic development. She began to paint with a passion perhaps uniquely reserved for one in constant fear of dying. 3 Within two years, with her heart in her hand and her paintings under her arm, she would seek out Diego Rivera who would confirm her talent and find her lovable. He was less constant with the latter appraisal that created in her psyche an additional inseparable fear: the loss of Diego's love. For the rest of her life, she would paint mostly about herself with a vivid emotional drive, revealing her preoccupation with these dual anxieties: possible death and impossible Diego. Linda Nochlin in her article, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? describes the characteristics of those exceptional successes: they were either daughters of artist fathers or "had a close personal connection with a strong or dominant male artistic personality." Frida's father, whom she adored - and vice versa - was a painter and successful photographer. From Diego, she would receive still another "ticket" to success. Frida's biographers, like Nochlin, deal only limitedly, if at all, with what the "client" has returned to the patron. How much did "she" contribute to "his" art if not by criticism, instruction and direction, then by emotion and feeling. Rivera described her work, "In the whole history of art, Frida is the only example of a painter virtually tearing her breast and heart open in order to express the feelings within ... Frida is the first artist to portray the real act of birth (her own) which brought forth the world's leading woman painter, the best ever proof of the existence of Mexican art." Let us not overlook that Rivera, for all the Revolutionary fervor of his art and politics, spent the years 1907-1921 (the most violent years of the Revolution) safely abroad with his fellow artists in Paris. As a child of the x Revolution (as Rivera would often depict her), Frida was the authentic offspring of her nation's La Lucha, and this she combined with that of her own struggles. In terms of passion, to use the slogan of Mexico's most popular consumer product (Coca-Cola), Frida was "the real thing"; Diego, by comparison, was the counterfeit. If the jury is still out regarding Diego's rank among Mexico's greatest painters, an early verdict was reached regarding his stature among womanizers. "Rivera himself was the greatest of womanizers." (Kandell) This was surprising on two counts. Herrera describes the first (and alludes to the second): 4 "Although he was undeniably ugly, he drew women to him with the natural ease of a magnet attracting iron filings. Indeed, part of his appeal was his monstrous appearance -- his ugliness made a perfect foil for the type of woman who likes to play beauty to a beast --but the greater attraction was his personality. He was a frog prince, an extraordinary man full of brilliant humor, vitality, and charm.

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